Conventions for typing diacritics

[garonne]

Typing accented letters and other diacritics can be tricky if you don't have the right keyboard, and lots of languages seem to have developed conventions for representing them

Comments

[biascut]

I think you've got the causation the wrong way round for the German example - ss, ae, ue and oe are all older than ß, ä, ü and ö, which are contractions of the former. It was handy that there was an easy alternative for people using non-German keyboards or typewriters once typing came in in the second half of the nineteenth century, but they weren't invented to get around that problem.

[dieastra]

Wow, I didn't know that about ue etc.!

But isn't ß actually from the old German way to write sz?

[muckefuck]

Correct, and it used to be more common to see people write "sz" when "ß" wasn't available.

As for the umlauted characters, the two dots actually represent an extreme simplification of a tiny "e" written above the vowel. In older German manuscripts (and occasionally newer texts made to imitate them, such as historic markers) they are clearly visible.

[biascut]

Yes, but back when the first letter was the long s, ſ. I don't know whether it was always just ſz though, or whether it was ſs as well. But I think ss as a variant for ß still predates typewriters.

[gemini_artemis]

In Portuguese, when we can't type diacritics, we usually just type the words without them, except for words that could be ambiguous, like "é" ("he/she/it is") which we type as "eh" to distinguish it from "e" ("and"). I've also seen this final "h" being used to replace the acute accent (á, é, í, ó, ú) in other words even when they wouldn't cause any ambiguity, like só > soh, lá > lah, etc.

Also, the word "não" ("no") is often written as "naum" to replace/avoid the tilde.

Some websites automatically turn "ç" into "ss", but this is absolutely not done by native speakers! If they do it, it means they just can't spell. :P

[garonne]

Hey, interesting. That's just the sort of thing I was curious about, thanks! It's funny how every language seems to have come up with a different way to represent the same accents.

[muckefuck]

For Irish, the h following certain consonants is actually a recent Latin-alphabet convention for representing consonants with the ponc séimhithe, a dot above which indicates lenition. Thus ponc séimhithe itself is really a respelling of ponc séiṁiṫe (mutatis mutandis, given that some of the lettershapes are quite different in cló Gaelach).

Back in the ASCII days, there was a convention of using forward slashes to represent the acute accent, e.g. "se/imhiu/" for séimhiú ("lenition"). Actually, usage varied, with the slashes preceding the vowels as well, e.g. "s/eimhi/u". (That was the usage I preferred, but as I recall I was in the minority.) Elsewhere I remember seeing a following apostrophe for languages like Spanish and French, e.g. "cre'me bru^le'e". (I saw that occasionally with Irish as well, but not as often.) Here also, some people preferred to have the diacritics precede rather than follow. As long as someone stuck to one convention or the other within the same post, it wasn't a problem.

[spamsink]

Here also, some people preferred to have the diacritics precede rather than follow.

This could be the reason for the infamous Verdana diacritics bug. To this day some people keep writing accent marks before the accented vowels.

[garonne]

Hmm, interesting example! Forward slash seems to me to be a very sensible way to represent an acute accent, actually.

I never thought of that lenition example in Irish, I suppose because it was part of a general change in the typesetting of Irish, right? Rather than people informally trying to represent something which is more correctly written otherwise, I mean.

[muckefuck]

I don't know the aetiology of it. It could well have originated as an informal convention which was later widely and officially adopted. How many non-European languages are stuck with orthographies whose quirks date back to arbitrary decisions made by a couple of colonial-era missionaries struggling to put together a Bible translation?

[muckefuck]

Since Vietnamese is legendary for its diacritics, you might be particularly interested in the conventions for writing it in ASCII: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/soc.culture.vietnamese/WgoIj9_Ovu0. (Soc.culture.vietnamese is an old Usenet newsgroup that was very active back in the 90s; the conventions listed behind the link were widely observed there. As I recall, "o'" and u'" were the most common ways of writing ơ and ư, though--as you can see--there were several more distinct alternatives.)

[garonne]

Hey, interesting! That's just the sort of thing I was curious about, thanks.

[lied_ohne_worte]

Ah, nothing nicer than to see people think they can produce a "ß" by doing a "B", because if it looks similar, it must be the same, right? I ripped my CD of Bach's Christmas Oratorio once, and the database from which the program pulled the titles of the individual parts had clearly been handled by someone who was, well, doing their best without knowing German. So,

"Großer Herr und starker König" ["Great lord and strong king"]

became

"GroBer Herr Und Starker Konig" ["Rude/coarse/gruff lord and strong king"; plus capitalisation of every word in titles is something we don't do in German]

[muckefuck]

When I was studying in Germany, some fellow students came back from Heidelberg with a tale of being asked the way to the "Schlob" by some American tourists. Later on they came across a sign and one of them called out, "Hey look, it's the Fubweg to the Schlob!"

[anicca_anicca2]

That's funny.